The Herald newspaper has reported today that shamefully only 21% of professors at universities in Scotland are women, with the highest proportion being 31% at Glasgow Caledonian University.

It is clear that women’s underrepresentation is not just a problem within the political, business and even student union spheres but also at the basic level of who teaches our students and makes the decisions about the curriculum in our universities.

For women students who have ambitions to be a professor, or to lead in the field of academia, it can be extremely disheartening to peruse the landscape of professorship.

When the majority of students in our universities are women, we should be very concerned that only a few of them will be able to make the promotion to professorship.

If you think back to a time when you admired and were inspired by someone and thought, ‘I could do that’ or ‘that could be me’, whether you feel you could relate to or connect with that person is an important part of creating that aspiration.

When the professors of your university are made up of mostly white men, it becomes harder for women students to visualise themselves in the role.

Having more women professors won’t just encourage more women into academia, but will also change the shape of the curriculum for students. We all have a lived experience and bring that into the work that we do and the priorities we have. It is important that the curriculum is also the most informed and of high quality.

The problem with a lack of diversity is not just the unfairness on people who don’t fit the ‘norm’ of white, non disabled, straight man.

A lack of diversity also means that there will be aspects of the field missed out, a lack of different perspectives which then leads to the privileging of certain priorities and viewpoints which then become known as empirical truth, or ‘it just is’, thus ignoring (or simply being blind to) the real life experiences of the majority of the population (and student population).

We know that when more women are elected to parliament, parliament’s priorities change as women bring their own priorities from their experience as life as a woman and therefore parliament starts to reflect more of the electorate and their issues (although still no where near enough).

Women’s underrepresentation is not just bad for women students, it is bad for high quality teaching and learning.

You can’t be (well it is much more difficult) to be what you can’t see, so I hope Scottish universities start being proactive in increasing their representation of women in professorships and not just assuming that because an equality act exists, barriers don’t.

After all, the act of buying a gym membership in itself does not cause you to get fitter unless you actually go to the gym on a regular basis and do something about it.